In stages of chip design and package design, a complete design flow generally includes defining a product, analyzing the performance, and verifying the performance. At the product definition phase, the form of the product is defined and chosen mostly based on the engineer's experience together with a quick performance estimation tool or simulation with a simplified model. Currently, the accuracy of the quick performance estimation tool is not high enough (e.g., lower than 90%), and the simulation with a simplified model is time consuming (e.g., over 10 minutes). The accuracy and the time required make it challenging to come up with a design that optimizes the performance at the early stage of product design.
At the early stage of chip design, the power consumption performance of the chip is known. However, since it is difficult to define the form and the performance of the package beforehand, it is difficult to estimate the temperature performance of the chip under the conditions of the package and the system chosen in practice. Traditional product development adopts a sequential flow, where the assembly house handles the package design after the chip is developed. Afterwards, the product system is designed. According to the sequential flow, some performance issues may only arise during the intermediate or late stage of development. Hence, the designer can only adopt remedial measures, and it is difficult to optimize the design of the product.
Known methods for evaluating the chip temperature include detailed model simulation, equivalent model simulation, and compact thermal model evaluation. Detailed model simulation is highly accurate, but is time-consuming and requires a large amount of computational resources. Equivalent model simulation is moderately accurate, but still takes quite a while. Compact thermal model evaluation also takes time, and its accuracy is rather unstable. Thus, how to design a platform tool for the early stage of product development to provide a sufficiently accurate performance estimation analysis within a short period of time to avoid over-/under-design of the product remains an issue to work on.